Bill Maher made Friday’s episode of Real Time “a very momentous night” with a prediction. He believes Donald Trump will lose the 2024 U.S. presidential race.
Maher told viewers he has been called a “Trump alarmist” but pointed out that he correctly predicted that the former Apprentice star would survive the Access Hollywood tape scandal and that he wouldn’t gracefully concede in the 2020 election.
“Every time he’s done crazy s**t and gotten himself in trouble, I said, ‘No, no, it’s not over,’” Maher said, as seen in an X clip. “Tonight I’m saying, I think it’s over.”
Maher compared Trump to Joseph McCarthy, the Republican U.S. senator who made spurious accusations of communism in the 1950s. “He had a hold on America, and it blew out in about two years, right? Two, three years,” Maher said. “He was the biggest thing, and then it was just [over].”
Bill Maher on Trump: “I’m going to make this a very momentous night with a prediction… I think it’s over… He’s going to lose.” pic.twitter.com/lR5re1lXws
— Blue Georgia (@BlueATLGeorgia) September 14, 2024
And then Maher cited one of Trump’s false statements at the latest presidential debate, in which Trump repeated a baseless claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are “eating the dogs.”
“I feel like ‘eating the dogs,’ we’re at this point,” Maher said. “I feel like we’re at Captain Queeg with the strawberries [in The Caine Mutiny], we’re at Denzel at the end of Training Day … I just think he’s going to lose.”
Also in that September 13 episode, Maher mentioned Taylor Swift’s endorsement for Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential race in an Instagram post that drove about 406,000 people to click on a link to Vote.gov, a U.S. government-run voter registration website.
“Taylor Swift finally told people who to vote for,” Maher said on Friday’s show, per Deadline. “Of course, immediately the response from the other side was, ‘Celebrity endorsements don’t matter.’ People are always so behind on these things. That’s the conventional wisdom for a long time, many celebrity endorsements don’t work … Not in this case. I mean, just the number of people who were immediately registered from that tweet.”
Maher later quipped that the pop star “saved democracy” with her Instagram post.
Real Time With Bill Maher, Fridays, 10/9c, HBO